Amapô

Carôlina Gold: Although we are no longer that young, we are influenced by the surf universe, hippies, the skate scene, indie, electronic, emo, and hardcore music -- everything. A of lot of it is from our childhood. Everybody says that Amapô is something from the 80s, but there is more to it than that. We consider our fashion works of art, the only difference is that we exhibit our creations on the runway.

You design clothing for men too. That’s a bit surprising considering your clothing is quite dramatic and exaggerated.Pitty Taliani:

Actually, we are investing more time now working on men’s clothes, mainly jeans -- making some more masculine models and trying to attract a more masculine audience.

Carôlina Gold: It’s hard because fashion culture in Brazil isn’t something a lot of people follow. For women it’s small, and for men it’s practically nonexistent. Men here are morons when it comes to their clothes. They dress terribly. It’s so sad. You can’t find a handsome guy who dresses well. They think that if you dress well, then you’re gay. If you wear something a little bit more colorful, then you’re gay. So it’s difficult, but we’re teaching all different kinds of people how to have a fashion culture, including boys. We have clothes that are intended to convey a bit of a fashion education.

Who is your main audience? Do you sell a lot of clothing outside Brazil?

Carôlina Gold: Our main commercial audience is abroad: Japan, the United States, and Europe. We export and sell more in other countries than we sell here.

One of the unique things about Amapô is your unique process for creating prints. Can you tell us about it?

Carôlina Gold: Amapô lived through a major revolution in the fashion world, which was the creation of digital printing techniques. This was a major historical moment for fashion, and it was huge. Before this development, you could only print through a silk-screen process, and that process required a huge amount of fabric and a lot of time as well.

There are certain limitations to the silk-screen method of printing as well, right? How do new ways of printing fabric get rid of these restrictions?

Carôlina Gold: There are many color and other limitations to silk-screening. For instance, the kinds of drawings you can work with are limited. We like to do things that are more exotic, freer, and have something like 18,000 colors. We do a lot of digital printing, which is a much more immediate technique. It’s like a large computer printer, but it prints on fabric.

Pitty Taliani:There are drawings we do completely on the computer where nothing is hand-drawn. And then there are others that we still design manually, depending on the effect we are trying to get. I would really like it to be possible to draw with a pen on these computer drawing tables and then create clothing patterns on the computer from that -- I want to create some really crazy things in 3-D.

It's kind of weird to think that some of the clothing you make has no tangible prototypes, which defies the history of garment making. Do you ever wish things were more like the old days?Pitty Taliani:

This is the process; everything works via email and there’s nothing physical. It’s like, “Look, I’m sending the design now.” Then you send it, someone else receives it, and they just send the fabric. It’s as simple as that. Why complicate things?